Bondbug

Had more time to look at this now. Very much a WoW type, but I prefer it - not so full of aggressive strutting types demanding duels every few seconds and shouting chicken when you can't be bothered with them. Mind you I have not yet emerged from the training areas. You can dual class here - I have a lvl12 priest/lvl11 scout. And you can learn all the material collecting and manufacturing skills before you go out into the big world, and even take them to reasonably useful levels. I have a basic house "home" where I need to go to switch my primary and secondary classes, which is a bit of a nuisance, but you can only level in one class at a time though many skills of the current secondary class are available. The fact that you are still examining the various aspects of the game within these training areas does not mean that there are not a few nasty surprises which can kill off the unprepared, and for a number of quests you are encouraged to work in groups even at this stage. It may even be impossible to do them solo. And I suspect that the world outside will be tough enough for most HC type Plenty of servers, all here european , most "crowded" a lot of the time. Judging from the national flags on these servers there is only one French, with three channels, and not overcrowded. Most are PVE oddly enough. I would recommend giving it a try.

"Smetana" - we know the word but do not really have this product here. It is a sort of soured double-cream, or perhaps a curd cheese. Known but not used in French cuisine as far as we can see. It must be similar to the soured cream Viv uses to make her cheese at one stage in its production. Your Schmandkuchen looks similar to the fruit/currant slices I used to love from English bakers, though I think the top layer was not your Schmand.

Brilliant Chattius ... many thanks. - what sort of building are you using here? - I note that your oven is different from the ones used here. Here they have one big oven and the fire is inside this space. When the oven reaches the highest required temperature, the 'braises' (glowing cinders, I suppose) are either pushed to the back and sides and the cooking area sponged/cleaned a bit, or the 'braises' are removed. As far as I can see, you have the fire in a separate oven below the cooking space. I suppose the floor of the cooking space is iron? It looks a better and more manageable arrangement. I will build one like that. - Hope you will not be offended -your English is excellent (who was it that taught me the word 'peen' and 'peening'!). I think when you say "We prefer the yeast dough thin and cross." that you probably mean "thin and crisp" . P.S. my wife has just popped in to say to tell you she admires your English and wishes she had kept up her German just as well. On a different subject ... just to mention, because this particular item only happens once a year. We have chives in the garden, and at this moment they are in flower. The pretty pink flowers in the pic, a bit like clover to look at, are very good chopped and mixed into a soft cheese. The cheese starts a bit like your Schmand, I think, then is strained well and pressed a bit to firm it. We mix various herbs (only one type per portion) with some of this cheese, chives, parsley, marjoram, etc and also ground cumin which works well. The chive flowers, as long as they are used fresh, are a once a year treat.

Chattius ... (no rush) ...if I may ask you a favour ... can you set out for me a detailed description of one of your bakehouse days. I am particularly interested in how you co-ordinate the state of the oven with the preparation of the different items waiting to be cooked. So ... (a beginners guide if you like) ... when is the fire lit, what wood, when do you expect it to arrive at a "start cooking" temperature, how do you judge the cooling down period and the times for putting in the different doughs, dishes, whatever. Where dough/yeast is involved how do people know when to start preparing the food. It is a fairly precise process isn't it? ... and no doubt a full day's programme. Do you provide food preparation areas/tables or is it all done at home? Must be a great community atmosphere, both during and at the end of the day ... a great communal banquet? I would not go so far as to say that there is no community life in the city, especially among the not-too-well-off, but it a takes different form, an exchange of different expertises, a different contact pattern.

(Sorry to be double posting but this is a slightly different subject) @Loco ... "You know I find this thread one of my favorites. Like sitting under a shade tree with a tall glass of iced tea and just shootin the breeze with old good friends." Here is your tree Loco, just outside the Inglenook window. I think your wife might like it too. Difficult to get a decent photo, not enough room to stand back from it, and my little tinny camera can't cope with the light contrasts if the sun is shining. The way things are going we might have to include a kitchen garden, or perhaps what can you grow in the window or on the balcony if you do not have a garden.

(Just a note of irritation - I wish I had a Streuselkuchen for every time I start a post then nick back for a reference in a previous post and come back to find my draft gone) You make me jealous with your bakehouse days, mainly I think because of the community life that goes with it. We do well with our small wood oven here, but it is usually just myself and wife. The 90cm diameter oven is in a small dining area. We sometimes invite people in for a meal, but the oven and cooking keep us occupied and my wife seems to think we are being unsociable! Probably because 4 visitors is the most we can fit in, and they usually sit in a different area to the kitchen/dining area. Redcurrants - don't know. If I prune every branch that is carrying fruit this year there will be no bush left - the wife will kill me! Blackcurrants/gooseberries - I pruned out a few bits crowding the centre of these bushes a few years back. So they must be about due for another clean out. Thanks. The Josta has already had a few branches pruned because it was trying to take over the neighbours garden over the top of the wall. The Streuselkuchen looks good. We will look it up and give it a go. It was a jam sponge we cooked yesterday. Nice and light and going down well. There are so many wonderful cakes for home baking. Nothing you buy in the shops to equal them. How about Streuselkuchen mit Quark found on Google ... I think yours looks better. The topping is much the same as 'crumble' which is a desert in GB. We also have a recipe for "Apple Kuchen Bread" which also looks good.

I thought food for the skint was spaghetti (good for athletes as well). We used to eat it out of a bowl, rub garlic round the bowl, grate cheese on top. But yes, OK, noodles. Soy sauce? For us that would have been ketchup or brown sauce, the cheap ones that were almost neat vinegar! But for rock bottom I used to have a cup of Oxo. One cube would do two days. But hardly "comfort" food!

Yes, that's the one ... Bauer ... Josta. Very robust. No problems. Heavy crops. Fruit freezes well. My wife makes pies, jam ... anything that you can do with currants or gooseberries. Our gooseberries are finished, the redcurrants are half done, these and blackcurrants will be ready in a day or two. I think you will find them very satisfactory ... ours have taken only a couple of years to become well established. I am not sure about pruning for these. Similar to blackcurrants I suppose, but I am not sure.

Another idle thought. You who play several different games - do you ever find the need to organise the keyboard commands to suit your needs, and if so how do you like to layout your keyboard? I ask because, having an 'Azerty' keyboard, and being faced with games where movement is so often based on the Qwerty layout, this is a regular problem. WSAD may be convenient for some but is less so for us. Even then games are inconsistent even with these 4 commands. Commands for 'character', 'backpack' or inventory, quests, stand/sit, run/walk, select weapon, attack,journal, whatever - they are all over the place ... to the extent where I now standardise wherever I can. Even in the single hour's play I managed with Sacred 2 I had great difficulty with moving smoothly, and with keys which produced unexpected (to me) results. It is noticable too that manuals for non US/English versions do not show commands for the keyboards normally used in the relevant country. French editions still refer to WSAD and QE, which is translated on the French keyboard as ZSQD and AE etc; etc. Yes you get used to this for a single game, but when you move from game to game it makes life difficult. So I standardise ... forward, back, right left, turn R, turn L, inventory, character, skills, journal, quests/log, sit/stand, run/walk, weapons, spells - all as convenient to my left hand as poss. Oddly enough the letter M for 'map' does not seem to be affected, despite being one row and three columns different on the two keyboards. Do you have a layout? Maybe I am just dead ignorant and this is something everyone does automatically?

Well I'll be .... Chattius, you are teaching me my own language. "Peening" ... correct, friend. I had to look it up cos I did not know the word. "Peen" - I have a hammer with such a head and I never knew that that was what it was called. On my hammer the 'peen' is round, but wedge shaped is also correct. You learn something new every day! Well, the bread got only a little burnt at the edges today, not too bad. Waiting for the oven to cool for the stew, and there is a cake and an egg custard to follow. Going to get fat(ter) tomorrow. I like the idea of getting back to a "bakehouse" ... I will have a word with the baker in the next village. Our gooseberries are finished - we only have one bush and not much fruit this year. But our one redcurrant is fruiting well, and we have a bush which is halfway between gooseberry and a currant, and that produces enormous amounts of fruit.

Thanks Chattius. I did not know that that Bakehouse tradition was still alive. Great. As far as I know it is lost here. ... as for our oven, the pizzas are just a happy memory, and it will soon be bread time. We make pizzas about 8" diameter and fairly thick - naples style I believe - not the thin and crispy ones. ... I have a nasty feeling that the bread will be ready too early and the oven still too hot ... recriminations ahead? ... better put a little more rum in my coffee

Elderflower - strained this year's supply yesterday, and bottled it this morning. Only 5 litres but it goes a long way. Lit the wood oven for the next batch of bread, pizzas, etc. Going to be a pleasant productive day ... unless I get the fire wrong and the temperatures are not right at the required times which are difficult to predict and I get sworn at for incompetent oven management or the bread rises too fast or too slow or we get the timings wrong, or things get burnt that shouldn't, etc. etc. etc.... OR (I nearly forgot the most frequent problem) I get involved in writing posts for this forum and forget to keep an eye on the oven. ...NO... It IS going to be a nice pleasant productive day. By the way, Chattius, I forgot to ask ... do you have your recipe for sour dough. Viv is using a potato based recipe at present. One of the things about being in charge of a wood oven is that you get a lot of short breaks, 10 minutes here and there which are not long enough to start playing on line, but just long enough to write a bit more rubbish in here! So here we are, oven going well, the brick shell is heating nicely, the parsley and marjoram for the pizzas are chopped, the pizzas will go in in about half an hour. Chopping herbs is my job. In my student days I once had an evening job helping the chef in the kitchen of a small night club. Mainly washing up, but I also learned to chop parsley fine enough to satisfy a French chef (well, he put on a French accent). Something my wife can't find time to do properly and I take pleasure in doing it, not as a full-time job but when the need arises. Herbs are so simple to grow, even if you have no garden, so we grow all our own and save quite a lot of money. Spices unfortunately are not so easy - those we have to buy ... and use economically. In GB it was not difficult to find a store which did Indian supplies where spices were a reasonable price. Here in France there is little choice but to pay very high prices. Whoops ... gotta go pour a glass for the chef and check the oven.

Glad to hear that Gogo. The young lass concerned is doing a fair job moderating in a very bitchy macho young teenage forum.

Has anyone looked at this site ? It cropped up in another forum, but I didn't go in to assess it!

The Inglenook is really intended for this sort of stuff as well as any general food/drink chat, or maybe the bar? There is a lot of problems in kitchen with 'terminology' where the same thing has different names in different countries, like swede-turnip-rutabaga.

Does anyone know anything about "Wippien" as a possible alternative to Hamachi?

Go for it piscikeeper! But I had better settle this other daft business first. OK Loco ... correct - but very formal and serious. Daft adj esp Brit. colloq 1. silly, foolish, crazy 2. (foll. by about) fond of, infatuated with [ME daffte = OE gedaefte; mild, meek f. Gmc] OK. Got that! I'd be surprised. If so please tell me what on earth 'f.Gmc' refers to. I am sure Chatius can find a daft reference as ME and OE are Anglo-Saxon dased and no doubt derived from the German. Daffy, as in duck, is similar but different. OK? We also have "daft as a brush", "daft 'a'porth" ... er ... I use it all the time when talking to my wife ... like "divvn't be se daft, hinny"... er ... help please you north of GB folk! Geordies, Tykes, Makkems, even Sassenachs (which I use in its correct meaning to refer to the lowland Scots) ... a little help please! Well. Having stirred up all that mucky water ... what is next I wonder ... I have a feeling that the only thing on thread here is Piscikeeper. Funny (funny = peculiar) thing. After updating various things (NVIDIA, Dx) as per advice received, and having briefly entered the game, and having reinstalled several times, I am right back at my position in post 3 ... and I can't remember where I went from there! Can't win them all. Daft innit?

Is that German law or Brussels law? I will need to check this out. I use to get sheep bits from the local butcher when he slaughtered ( two or three times a year) and a local farmer did a pig now and then and a friend in the village did excellent mutton once a year. But all three have stopped now. I will come back, but just now we have to go and rehearse with the choir for Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem.

Performance was a bit twitchy; but not too bad - but it stopped dead after 30-40 mins. And don't be daft Rotluchs, I virtually live here these days. Wife even made me a chef's hat to wear when I am in the kitchen.....plus that Smiley Schot "cooked" up P.S. I am saving for a GeForce update

Live, perhaps?

Prospects? Forecast?

After 4 years! You are surprised? (I'd have been too scared to touch it)

Not your music? Try this with your friends

Sounds brilliant, but I am not quite sure what is meant by a "house butchering". Is this the traditional custom of slaughtering an animal "at home" I.e. on the farm?. If so I think it is been more or less stopped by the laws, and is only practiced in the more remote rural areas. But to my mind it is an excellent tradition. Stuff the miserable joy-killers in Brussels. Even the local butchers here are no longer allowed to slaughter on their premises despite having perfectly clean and well equipped space for this purpose. So many small businesses have closed because of rules that are only relevant for larger concerns. "Sour dough" is also more or less lost here. In English it is "leaven". So sour dough bread is "leavened bread", but I don't think you will find the term used these days. LATER ... (I got summoned to the table to eat). I think Gogo, the Canadians, and Americans will be interested in your speaking of "sour dough". It will take them back over 100 years in their history when "Sour-dough" was the name given to prospectors and early explorers/travellers, especially in Alska and the N-W territories of Canada, who always carried a stock in a jug or jar. Note to Gogo : there is a recipe in my copy of your Canadian "Chatelaine Cookbook". As for Sauer Broi I don't think there is an English/American equivalent. It seems to be a "stew" which covers so many dishes which use the hundreds of local ingredients available in different areas of different countries. But it is the tradition which is interesting. It is good to see this sense of 'community' still active. I wonder if the city dweller has any such tradition?

That bloody war! Keep trying to forget and it keeps coming back. I suppose we are lucky in a way. Other parts of the world there are monstrous problems with old bombs and landmines still lying about for the kids to play around. How are the floods by the way?